Through their leadership on the Educator Standards Board (ESB), several OFT members have worked to amend the OTES Framework in a way that increases its value as a development tool for teachers. The Ohio Board of Education approved ESB-recommended improvements to the OTES framework for teachers.
Several changes and clarifications affect the 2015-2016 educator evaluations relating to the use of value-added data, the requirement for professional growth or improvement plans and the use of alternative components.
- The teacher framework documents incorporate safe harbor provisions pertaining to evaluations. Specifically, the frameworks state that only districts, schools and other education agencies that have memoranda of understanding in place may include in evaluations applicable value-added scores from state assessments administered during the 2014-2015 and 2015-2016 school years.
- For evaluations in years prior to 2015-2016, teachers with average or higher final growth wrote professional growth plans and those with less than average final growth wrote improvement plans. For evaluations beginning with the 2015-2016 school year, the new framework requires that teachers use the final summative rating to determine the type of plan (professional growth or improvement) they will follow for the next school year and the level of autonomy for his or her plan development. Teachers with final summative ratings of accomplished, skilled or developing will develop professional growth plans. Those with ineffective final summative ratings must have improvement plans. Evaluators must approve plans for teachers with developing and ineffective ratings. However, as has always been the cas, districts have discretion to place a teacher on an improvement plan at any time based on deficiencies in any individual component of the evaluation system, subject to collective bargaining.
- Districts using the alternative framework will have three major components included in final summative ratings: teacher performance will be 50 percent, the student growth rating of 35 percent and an alternative component of 15 percent. For the alternative component, districts may choose one of five options: student surveys, teacher self-evaluations, peer review evaluations, student portfolios or another component determined appropriate by the district board or governing authority. Districts, however, may not use teacher performance or a student growth measure as the alternative component; this would result in weighting these measures higher than 50 or 35 percent respectively as required by law. OFT interprets that the performance side of the evaluation may be used to determine the focus of the 15 percent in the alternate framework. Keep in mind that the 15 percent is locally determined.
It is important to have OFT members on the Educator Standards Board so that the voice and expertise of our members is included in discussions like these. OFT members on the ESB include Chairwoman Sandy Orth, Toledo Federation of Teachers, Local 250, and members Jeff Cooney, Oregon City Federation of Teachers, Local 1080, and Jim Wagner, Cleveland Teachers Union, Local 279.